


walk a lonely road

by ashkatom



Series: OLOHverse [4]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Post-Ascension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-04
Updated: 2015-11-04
Packaged: 2018-04-30 00:50:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5144255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashkatom/pseuds/ashkatom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>> H0W L0NG 3X4C7LY D0 Y0U 7H1NK Y0U C4N K33P 7H15 G01NG??</p>
            </blockquote>





	walk a lonely road

**Author's Note:**

> Postcards from the [sideblog](http://www.onextendedvacation.tumblr.com). This prompt was "Psii, giving the new Empress unsolicited advice."

The Battleship Condescension - now the Flagship, title pending until someone thinks of one for you that sticks - is larger than you had ever dreamed. You never explored all of your hive, before you left, because at some point you decided that the comfort of the rooms you’d claimed as your own was more palatable than mapping out the twists of every hallway. Trying to find a room that feels like it belongs to you feels even more impossible in yet another hand-me-down palace from your Ancestor - the closest you’ve come is your first introduction to the Flagship, its medbay, and you can’t live there.

The ship \- the crew, in general, seem equally as lost as you. Mostly they do their best to escape your attention, sliding around the edges of rooms, and leave you to Karkat. You understand why they tend to prefer going through Karkat than directly to you, even if it makes him scream about having more responsibilities to keep track of. Maybe it’s even because of the screaming! The revolution hasn’t made Karkat any less hilarious, which you’re glad about; he’s the one thing keeping you sane at this point, since Sollux and Aradia were the only people with the expertise and your trust you could send to oversee the Helming retrofits. You’re grateful beyond measure that they’re able to help you out, as spread-thin as you are, but you wish they were able to help you out from not-the-other-side-of-the-sector.

You do gain a reputation for uncompromising hard work, though. With nowhere that feels like home, you just - work. Your inbox is enough of an eldritch abomination that it nearly qualifies as a replacement lusus, with more reports coming in every second as you start sorting through every single order deemed important enough that you should know about it. The Empire is large enough - you’re starting to _really see_ that the Empire is large enough - that these are only the highest-level directives, but even with that, your inbox overflows. You set up a husktop in the bridge and cross your legs as you sit in a chair off to the side, or you walk with your palmtop and learn the confines of your new hive, or you sit in on Karkat’s meetings and watch him make your subjects nervous as you approve orders to search out survivors in dead sectors. People always see you working, working, working and they try to _match_ you.

It doesn’t relent, is the thing. You have Karkat, and Karkat has a selection of people he’s steamrolled into helping him organise all his duties, and you’d be buried a thousand times over without Aideen making sure that the ship would keep working through the apocalypse, but three people do not a smoothly-running Empire make. You’d wonder how your Ancestor kept it all in line, except you think that it’s more likely she didn’t. The polite pushback you’re getting from the chain of command points to a barely-functional hierarchy, where you refuse to slot in and be the idol that they want.

Being an idol - being _idle_ \- gets more tempting by the hour. That’s usually when you seek Karkat out. But even Karkat can’t be everywhere, or every _when_ , and you can only sleep in the ‘cupes in the guest blocks for an hour before you wake up all cramped and can’t get back to sleep, and then…

You miss Alternia. You miss your lusus. You miss Sollux and Aradia. You miss Nepeta, who still likes you a _pawful_ lot, but made her choice clear, after everything. Deep into the third shift, you even miss Equius. You can’t be seen to be leaning on anyone, but there are quite a few incidents of staring at your palmtop in the dark, thumbs hovering over the screen, before you turn the screen off and captchalogue it again.

It took so many people, so many connections that Vriska nearly severed in order to get you here. You weren’t built for this lonely pedestal, and now that you’re on it you don’t know how to get down. There’s nobody in the Empire to just be your _friend._

Something like a month in - it’s hard to keep track, without the moons, without your sleeping schedule as regimented as the rest of the ship - you reach your breaking point.

> 50 1 C0ULDN’7 H3LP 8U7 N071C3 7H47 Y0U N34RLY F3LL 45L33P 0N WUK0NG’5 5H0ULD3R  
> WH1CH 1’M N07 4G41N57 53R10U5LY F4LL 45L33P 0N WUK0NG’5 5H0ULD3R 17’LL 83 FUCK1NG H1L4R10U5  
> 8U7 H0W L0NG 3X4C7LY D0 Y0U 7H1NK Y0U C4N K33P 7H15 G01NG??

You put your palmtop down. It’s been long enough that the bridge no longer flinches when you come out of your own world and start paying attention to theirs, but two of the navigators flinch when you - very calmly - stand up and sweep out of the room in the most regal manner you can manage given that your entire body mostly just wants to lie down in the hall and sleep for a thousand sweeps. 

The way to the Helmsblock is ground into your memory already. You made sure that the door was re-keyed so that the lock was a privacy lock, not a keeping-secrets-from-the-Empire lock, but it opens for you, which is a good sign. The Helmsman is near-impossible to surprise, since he’s literally everywhere, but he probably would have let you run into the door just for the laugh if he was in the mood for it.

Your palmtop chimes as the door closes. You proceed to ignore it, leaning back against the door and sliding to the floor as you bury your face in your hands and surprise the Helmsman for probably the first time in centuries by screaming into your knees as loudly as your lungs can manage.

—

“I knew it,” the Helmsman finally says, after twenty minutes of you ignoring the increasingly-frantic chimes of your palmtop. “You only like me for my mouth.” When you don’t answer, his rasp of a voice turns coaxing. “I got you something.”

You look up at him, curiosity overwhelming the screaming still happening in the deepest depths of your soul. He looks at you - more a pleasantry of conversation than anything else, since he’s undoubtedly ‘looking at you’ through six different cameras - and waits.

“Why did you get me something?” you ask, unlocking your palmtop. 

“Because,” he says, solemnly. “You’re alone. You’re finding out that your friends can’t keep up with you, because you’re the Empire and nobody can keep up with the Empire. And you’re starting to burn out, so I wanted you to know that there are people-”

You click the link he’s sent you and then immediately hurl your palmtop across the room with a shriek at the stupid song Sollux thought was hilarious three sweeps ago. It keeps playing - _never gonna run around and desert you -_ as the Helmsman laughs so hard he starts coughing. “Sorry not sorry,” he wheezes. “Get your palmtop out of there, I did actually send you something.”

You groan and follow the noise of what is now your least favourite song, now somewhat muffled. Because you’re overtaxed and have the emotional capacity of a starfish, you really did hurl it right across the room. It’s nestled in biowires below the catwalk now, and you have to hook your knees around the railing and dangle to reach it. Before hauling yourself back up, you shut off the music, leaving the room with just the ambient noises of the ship and your harsh breathing.

“I regret every single life choice I have ever made,” you say, still hanging from the railing. The Helmsman just snickers as you check the rest of what he’s sent you, which makes you sit back up in alarm. “No! No-”

“Why not?” he asks cruelly, relentlessly, just like the rest of her Empire. “What are you afraid of?”

You close your eyes and wish very hard that your biggest worry was the biowire gunk getting in your hair, or the fact that there are so many unread messages piling up that your palmtop is never going to be the same. “I’m not _afraid-_ ”

“You stopped using the fish puns,” he says. When you don’t reply, he adds, “If anything bites, it’s only because I want it to.”

“I can’t believe that _that_ makes me feel better,” you say, and crawl your way back onto the catwalk.

—

The stairs you find lead straight to another plain, grey door that looks unsettlingly like another Helmsblock. The card reader unlocks it after you tap your ident against it, thanks to the permissions the Helmsman twisted the ship’s systems into giving you. The room-

The room is austere. Nothing like you expected, after the rotting decadence you found in every room of your hive, back on Alternia. Hives were meant to be razed and reconstructed by the drones, but your palace… your Ancestor’s touch was all over it, and the touch of Heiresses you never knew the names of, and you never questioned it. There was _love_ there, and pride, and the one thing you knew of your Ancestor was that she revelled in decadence.

This is wrong.

It’s obviously her respiteblock. Her hive, really - there are several blocks, which is ridiculous even on a ship the size of the Battleship. _Flagship_. But it’s like - someone has lived here, there’s a pair of shoes in the corner and clothes tossed across the floor near a wardrobifier, the recuperacoon has been used, and the large pool that takes up nearly an entire block means that the place has been crafted for seadweller comfort, but it’s _not her. Her_ is gold and fuchsia and black, _her_ is sharp teeth and a sharper voice, _her_ is the entire Empire filling every inch of every room.

“Feferi,” the Helmsman says, voice coming out of hidden speakers with an atonal, buzzing edge.

“Why did you bring me here?” you ask, numb and too, too tired.

“You’re afraid,” he says, the disembodied words surrounding you. “Afraid you can’t live up to what you promised. Afraid there’s no chance to quit. Afraid you’re going to hollow out until all that’s left is a sad reflection of your Ancestor, filling all the spaces she used to take up.” You wrap your arms around yourself and sink back down to the floor, here where nobody can see you, one of your hands resting on the thick scars above your hip. “I’ve watched it happen to one Empress, Feferi. I don’t want to watch it happen to another.”

“How much of _you_ did she leave you?” you ask, almost a whisper, almost a hope that he doesn’t pick it up. “Why do you care?”

There’s a long silence. “Not much,” he says, eventually. All the traces of his usual stupid persona, the one that seems like Sollux stereotypified, melt away, leaving something older than you have words for and wearier than you can comprehend. “Everything I have left, I have because of the people who loved me.” A longer pause. “Condesce had nobody.”

You look at the block. It is, very much, the block of someone who has nobody to care about, and who was cared for by nobody.

“Take it,” he says, as ruthless as your Ancestor made him. “Take it and make it _yours_. If you’re going to reshape the Empire, start with yourself, and get your fucking priorities in order.”

—

Karkat shakes you awake, an entire rotation of shifts later, and bitches at you about the wreck you’ve made of the place until you stop him by hugging the air out of his lungs. “It’s _my_ wreck,” you tell him, and snuggle your chin into his head. This has the effect of nearly suffocating him in your chest, at which point he stops bitching and starts awkwardly trying to crane his head away, because he is ADORABUBBL——E. “You can share if you want, though.”

His response is mostly swearing about how _he_ doesn’t have gills, and even if he _did_ have gills he can’t breathe _tits, Feferi_ , but he hugs back. As spread out as you all are, you know who got you here, and they didn’t do it because you were always meant to be Empress. None of you could have done this without caring - about yourselves, about each other, about the Empire. That was the first step you all took, and maybe the most revolutionary.

Belonging here is easy. All you need to do is make the rest of the Empire feel like they belong, too.


End file.
